Build a Game

Split the Arrow is the first Game Mode game. It won't be the only one, and they won't all be ours: Game Mode is open to anyone's game, and the launch experience will be as unique as the game that gates it.

The gate underneath isn't archery-shaped. It's two pieces: a signer that decides how much ETH a wallet has earned the right to spend, and a fee calculator that enforces that decision on chain. Nothing in either piece knows what a bow is. Any game that can look at a player and produce a number can drive it.

Note which direction this runs. A game developer never tokenizes their game — there is no coin for the game, and nothing for you to launch. Coins are launched by creators, who pick a game to be the entrance; your game is the launch's distribution mechanism. On an open pool the first block belongs to bots and snipers; inside a game, the first holders are the people who showed up and played. You build the room the launch happens in.

That opens up most of what "fair distribution" could mean:

• Skill — reflex, aim, timing. What Split the Arrow does.

• Knowledge — a trivia round for a community that actually knows its subject, gating the launch on getting the answers right.

• Luck — a raffle, for a project that would rather not reward the quickest thumbs.

• Effort — anything that costs a few minutes of genuine attention, which is already more than a sniper is willing to spend.

And "game" carries no blockchain qualifier. There is no requirement that a Game Mode game be about money, tokens, or chains — a real game in the Quake 3 sense qualifies exactly as well as a trivia round. Your game code never sees a wallet, a key, or a transaction.

The hackathon

The Game Mode Hackathon is open now, and submitting is deliberately itch.io-shaped: build your game with the Game Mode SDK, zip the static build, and upload it at flaunch.gg/game-mode/create with a name, a category and a short description. Hosting is included — we serve the game for you.

That is the whole submission. The gate — the signer and enforcement half described above — is a server, but not a second one: the gate is your game's server, running your rules and signing what they award. It only matters when a real launch runs through your game, and it is not part of a hackathon submission: a game built on the SDK's createMockRoom runs a complete round in the browser with no server at all. If you do want to demo against a real gate, the SDK ships one and the submission form takes its address; the SDK page covers both paths.

You also don't need to build from zero. If a browser game already exists — including a permissively-licensed open-source one — hand your AI coding agent the port-game-mode skill and it will walk the whole port: the scoring economy, the coin surfaces, the launch framing, and the ZIP.

npx skills add https://github.com/flayerlabs/flaunch-skills --skill port-game-mode

The best submissions join the official Game Mode library, and library games earn 5% of the trading fees of every coin that launches through them — for as long as creators keep choosing your game.

Under the hood

The contracts are live on Robinhood chain and Base and documented in full under Spend-Gated Launches — the launch parameters, the signature format, and every way enforcement can refuse a swap. You do not need any of it to build or submit a game; it is there for the curious and for anyone integrating at the contract level.

If you're building one, come and talk to us on Discord — we play every submission, and we'd rather help you ship than have you guess.